The present invention relates to data mining techniques and, in particular, to techniques for mining user query data.
The Web has been characterized by its rapid growth, massive usage, and its ability to facilitate business transactions. This has created an increasing interest for improving and optimizing websites to fit better the needs of their visitors. It is more important than ever for a website to be found easily on the Web and for visitors to reach effortlessly the content for which they are searching. Failing to meet these goals can mean the difference between success and failure on the Internet.
Web servers typically register important data about the usage of a website. This information generally relates to the navigational behavior of visitors, the queries made to the website's internal search engine (if one is available), and also the queries to external search engines that resulted in requests of documents from the website. Such queries account for a large portion of the visits of most sites on the Web.
Most of the queries related to a website represent actual information needs of the users that visit the site. However, user queries in Web mining have been studied mainly with the purpose of enhancing website search. Techniques are therefore needed which unlock the greater potential of this information.